Episode 109 — May 4, 2021
Adrianne Munden-Dixon: “Zastrugi” for violin
Performed by Adrianne Munden-Dixon

Adrianne Munden-Dixon is always searching for new, creative ways to play the violin. She first started learning the instrument as a young child when she was inspired by seeing John Blake, Jr. perform violin on the beloved television show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. As she continued to play, she was exposed to many different musical traditions—fiddling, improvised jazz, and rock, to name a few—in addition to her classical training. But improvisation immediately captured her imagination. For House Music, she plays her own composition, Zastrugi, which is notated, but leaves freedom to the performer to choose how to play the piece.

This House Music series video marks Munden-Dixon’s first solo performance with Metropolis Ensemble. She first worked with Metropolis alongside her string quartet, Desdemona, in 2018, when they premiered new works by the Kinds of Kings composer collective at Metropolis’s New York venue, One Rivington. Since then, Desdemona has played at the venue several more times, and Munden-Dixon loved each of the performances.

Munden-Dixon originally wrote Zastrugi for her friend and fellow Desdemona member, Carrie Frey. She wrote the music last winter, when she was living in Canada and surrounded by blustering snow. At that time, she also found herself playing music by the Belgian virtuoso violinist and composer, Eugène-Auguste Ysaÿe, so Zastrugi was a way of uniting both the snowy atmosphere and his sweeping compositional style into one. “Zastrugi” is a term for the ridges that winds form in snow; Zastrugi features airy harmonics and wispy sul ponticello bowings to create the color and feeling of those snowy waves. To write the piece, Munden-Dixon taped herself improvising for several days and then notated the music while listening to her recordings. For the House Music series, she performs Zastrugi from her living room in Montreal.

Notes by Vanessa Ague

 
House Music: Bite-sized concerts recorded at homes around the world

In 2020-21, we created a weekly video series featuring short-form concerts of newly-commissioned works, supporting 208 artists around the world during the pandemic.